11 new trailers you should watch this week

11 new trailers you should watch this week

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to catch an early screening of Skate Kitchen, which comes out this weekend, at a film festival in Brooklyn. The film is just wonderful — it’s about a skate group composed of teenage girls, and one girl in particular who runs away from home — and is fully just the kind of seemingly casual, relaxed picture about people trying to live that I absolutely love.

The screening I was at was particularly special though, because Skate Kitchen is a real group of skaters from New York, who star in the film as fictionalized versions of themselves. So the tiny theater was packed with people who (judging by the chatter around me) were friends and relatives of the film’s stars.

That led to some funny reactions, like having most of the crowd cracking up during a tense, awkward scene, while one skater was having a moment with Jaden Smith. I’d love the movie either way, but sometimes an audience’s reaction to a film becomes a wonderful part of the experience, too.

Check out 11 trailers from this week below.

The Deuce

I’m not sure how much I enjoyed the first season of The Deuce. It kept setting pieces in place, building and building toward something — and then as soon as it seemed to be in a place where the show could light a match and set off into something immensely exciting, it just ended. And now, we’re getting a first look at season 2, showing that the series is jumping ahead in time by several years. I’m interested, I’m skeptical, I’m ready to be slow rolled again. It starts September 9th.

The Nutcracker and The Four Realms

I’m extremely torn here. On one hand, this movie required extensive reshoots, during which the original director of the film — the guy behind this dog reincarnation movie — was entirely absent, leading to a second director getting his name in the credits. But on the other, I am so, so into what I’m seeing here. The visuals are hypnotic. And I’m not one to pass up a Keira Knightley film this heavily stylized. So I’m hoping for the best. It comes out November 2nd.

Maniac

Here’s our first real look at whatever Maniac is — though even with this look, it’s hard to get a sense of exactly what we’re in for, since at one point we seem to be looking at Emma Stone hallucinating herself in Lord of the Rings. The limited series, from the director behind the first season of True Detective, seems a bit like a trapper, more violent version of Eternal Sunshine, with a relationship wrapped up in some futuristic and borderline dystopian new science. It comes out September 21st.

Black Earth Rising

Netflix and the BBC have another co-produced series coming up, a thriller that has Michaela Coel (who you might remember from Black Mirror’s “USS Callister”) working to prosecute war crimes but becoming wrapped up in some kind of deadly conspiracy. More generally, the series seems to care about the experiences of African immigrants in England, and it seems like the overall subject matter gives the series a lot to examine. There doesn’t appear to be a release date yet, but usually these things air in the UK before heading to Netflix everywhere else.

The Innocents

And speaking of Netflix and British TV shows, it has another series coming up with a very Stranger Things-style premise, starring a young girl who’s being experimented on. Except in this case, it seems that she’s one of several people capable of shape-shifting. It comes out August 24th.

Fahrenheit 11/9

Michael Moore’s been at the head of the #resistance since he went viral just a day after the 2016 election for an old blog post predicting beat-for-beat how Trump would edge out a victory. Now, he’s turned that energy into a documentary, with its title playing off one of his most famous films to date. For what it’s worth, I find myself perpetually skeptical of Moore only to end up enjoying his documentaries, which have often been surprisingly prescient and forward-looking. I’m in the same place of skepticism after seeing this trailer, but I’ll admit I want to know more about where he takes what could be a very myopic subject. It comes out September 21st.

Bel Canto

Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel Bel Canto tells the story of a group of opera lovers held hostage for months by a rebel group trying to free their comrades from an opposing government. Despite the catchy setup, the novel spins into something far more intimate as it traces the relationships that form among the hostages. Now it’s been adapted into a film, with Julianne Moore starring, and it seems to be trying to boil a lengthy story into a short, tense picture, which I suspect will be tough. It comes out September 14th.

Kidding

Michel Gondry, the surreal director behind films like Eternal Sunshine, is re-teaming with Jim Carrey for an equally playful TV series about a Mr. Rogers-style TV host who begins to just completely lose it. I suspect this will be worth watching. May I also say, as someone who watches way too many trailers, this is a superbly cut trailer and the play between the music and what’s on screen is really working. It starts September 9th.

Slaughterhouse Rulez

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are back together for Slaughterhouse Rulez, which looks like a wacky mashup of a whole bunch of Harry Potter-style fantasy tropes. Pegg and Frost don’t appear to be the main stars here, but it’s at least something before the duo inevitably reunites with Edgar Wright. The film comes out on Halloween.

Escape at Dannemora

Ben Stiller usually directs comedies, but for some reason, he’s gotten behind the camera for Escape at Dannemora, a Showtime limited series about inmates who escaped from a New York prison in 2015 and led authorities on a weeks-long manhunt. Benicio del Toro and Paul Dano play the inmates, while Patricia Arquette stars as a prison employee who gets caught up in a tryst with the inmates and ends up helping them out. The series starts November 18th.